For five years skilled artisans have been carving a tombstone. The man who ordered the tombstone is still living, but the tombstone is vast in bulk, and the carvers have plenty of space to display their ingenuity. It is the order of the patron that work shall not cease until he is dead, and each year he sends the monument company a check for fifteen thousand dollars to cover running expenses. If the gentleman lives long enough, his tombstone will be a spectacle worth seeing when it is finally bundled into place over his casket. One of the most lavish and expensive--probably the most expensive--dinners ever given in America was a hyphenated feast, the record of which is writ large upon the annals of metropolitan society. It endured for six hours and cost fourteen thousand dollars per hour. But why enumerate any more of these instances? Our papers are full of them. My purpose, however, is larger than gossip and I shall mention other pieces of extravagance wherever they make a point. “_No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty--none less inclined to take or touch what they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost._” --ABRAHAM LINCOLN. _Chapter Three_ THE SUBJUGATION OF AMERICA In the golden days of American Society, as I have said, great fortunes were very rare indeed. The few that there were came mostly from merchandising and trade. The accumulations of John Jacob Astor, John Hancock, and Stephen Girard, in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, respectively, had not been dwarfed by the accumulations of a later era. They remained, up to about 1850, as the typical marvels of the American world of business. The middle of last century was the harvest time of Opportunity in this land. Agriculture and trade remained the staple occupations of the race; yet there had grown up throughout the land a wonderful manufacturing industry. Away back in the days of the embargo, a man named Samuel Slater had come over from England and built, from memory, the first American cotton mill. He little knew what seeds he sowed. That little mill set up in Rhode Island was the mother of American industry. It had grown, this infant, until in every valley of the East there stood factories and mills uncounted. Turning from the little iron mines of New Jersey, the pioneers of our greatest industry had begun to open up the hills of Pennsylvania and even Michigan. In that age, which has been called the golden age of industry, fortune followed swiftly upon the heels of honest labour.